setting up subscriptions by number of orders instead of date

Is there a way to set up a subscription that is based on the NUMBER of transactions rather than an end DATE? For example, someone prepays for 6 bags of coffee and the subscription automatically cancels after 6 shipments, rather than after 6 months / weeks or on a specific date?

Also, is there a way of reporting or tracking how many orders are remaining in a subscription? With the same example, if someone has bought a 6-coffee subscription, how can I know how many are remaining to be shipped? These have been paid for up front so are a liability from an accounting perspective. I'd like to be able to run a report and know what has been prepaid.

We are using Order Desk, in case that makes a difference for the reporting. I've searched the forum and wiki and can't figure these out.

Good question. Being able to set the number of periods for a subscription rather than the dates isn't something that we support right now - but it is something that we're planning to support in the future. For now, you will need to do some calculations on your add to cart page to work out what the end date should be based on the desired number of iterations.

It can be simplified a little with 2.0 as you can specify a number of days or months into the future that the subscription should end. For example - if the coffee is sent monthly, then you can set the end date to 6m - so on the 7th renewal it will cancel instead of renew (which if the initial sub was bought in Jan, it would cancel in July).

Also, is there a way of reporting or tracking how many orders are remaining in a subscription?

We don't currently automate that type of calculation - but you could work it out using the API, based on the frequency and the end date set.

These have been paid for up front so are a liability from an accounting perspective. I'd like to be able to run a report and know what has been prepaid.

Just to clarify - if the customer is paying up front for all 6 bags, how are you tracking the renewals each month?

Mostly, our subscriptions renew with each shipment - every 2, 3 or 4 weeks - and are ongoing so there are no end dates.

These questions come up because we are setting up gift subscriptions where the buyer essentially prepays for x number of bags of coffee that are shipped out over the next 2, 3 or 6 months and do not renew at all.

The default is to send every 4 weeks but we try and accommodate if people want it more frequently (every 3 weeks is popular) or to skip / delay an order.

It is pretty messy to try and track all that if we can't easily track how many have been paid for and how many have been shipped. Perhaps there is a way to set up different SKUs / item codes for the gift orders so that I can track them separately from regular coffee orders.

If you have suggestions for how to set up the gift orders, I'd love to hear them. And will wait for you to add number of periods for a subscription as an option. In the meantime, we'll manually adjust end dates as needed.

If you treat the gift purchases as a normal subscription - in that they pay for each specific order has it happens, rather than prepaying for them all upfront - then you could tell how many has been shipped for a given subscription by reviewing it's history in the FoxyCart administration. That would show you how many have been paid for so far. As noted previously, you could also set the end date to cover however many specific shipments they want to occur.

If a customer wanted to pause the order for a certain period, that would then need to be achieved by manually changing the next and end dates accordingly for that subscription.

Thanks Adam! Treating gift purchases as normal subscriptions doesn't really work without the prepaying part. Though it could be set up as $0 transactions for the rest of the shipments.

I was thinking about this and wondered if it could be approached in another way. What is the Future Shipping option? Can this be used for a product purchase - a customer buys it now for delivery in 1, 2 or 3 months?

A gift would be set up with $0 child products, each with a different future ship date.